Thursday, April 27th, in the year of our Lord 2017

By Adam McManus

North and South Korea Prepare for War

Kim Jong-Un’s army readied for war as they fired rockets and torpedoes at mock enemy warships during North Korea’s “largest ever” live-fire artillery drills on Tuesday, reports the Daily Mail.

Kim saluted the military as hundreds of tanks were lined up along the eastern coastal town of Wonsan and they fired 300 large-caliber artillery pieces.

Just one day later, South Korea conducted joint military live-fire drills with the US in Pocheon, South Korea, near the border with North Korea.

And South Korea has announced that key parts of a contentious US missile defense system have been installed.

Matthew 24:6 says, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.”

Democratic Senators Say Defunding Planned Parenthood in Spending Bill Will Cause Government Shutdown

Senate Democrats warned Republicans on Monday that attempts to take funding away from Planned Parenthood’s abortion business or pay for President Donald Trump’s border wall in a stopgap spending bill that must pass by late April would result in a government shutdown, reports Bloomberg Politics.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York declared, “If Republicans insist on inserting poison pill riders such as defunding Planned Parenthood, building a border wall, or starting a deportation force, they will be shutting down the government and delivering a severe blow to our economy.”

It’s unlikely that Schumer speaks for all Democrats. Ten Democratic senators face re-election in the 2018 midterm elections in states Trump won, and the president can argue he is merely trying to implement the agenda he ran on.

Anti-Trump Protesters Attack Heritage Foundation

Anti-Trump protesters targeted the conservative Heritage Foundation on Tuesday in the wake of a looming government shutdown.

The protesters who stormed the Heritage Foundation accused the organization of being “Trump’s think tank” and of supporting the President’s proposed budget which they said “will hurt our communities”, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The “People’s Action” Twitter account tweeted out photos and videos of the protest which we have linked in our transcript today.

Pro-Life Action League Protests Planned Parenthood Gala Fundraiser

On Wednesday night, the Pro–Life Action League protested the Planned Parenthood ‘Celebration Gala’ in Chicago. Eric Scheidler told The World View why it’s essential for pro-lifers to publicly object at Planned Parenthood’s fundraisers across the nation.

“Whenever Planned Parenthood holds a gala fundraiser we want to be there. We don’t want Planned Parenthood supporters to be able to forget the reality of what Planned Parenthood does.”

Scheidler said that many of Planned Parenthood’s supporters don’t really know that much about the nation’s largest abortion provider.

“Very many of their supporters including the very wealthy donors and the Hollywood celebrities who come out for events like these really don’t know that much about Planned Parenthood. They kind of vaguely think that it’s helping women and families. They believe Planned Parenthood’s propaganda. They don’t know that Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider. They don’t know that 35% of all abortions in America are done by Planned Parenthood.”

University Student Expelled for Facebook Post Opposing Homosexuality

A Christian Master’s student, who was expelled from his university for a private Facebook post he made stating that homosexuality was sinful, has secured the right to bring his case before London’s high court.

Christian Today reports that 38-year-old Felix Ngole, a father of four from Cameroon, Africa who is studying to be a social worker at the University of Sheffield, was told that he could no longer pursue his degree in social work after he stated his views about homosexuality on his Facebook account.

His Facebook post stated support for Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis who refused to issue a marriage license for a homosexual couple and he quoted Leviticus 18:22 which says, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.”

Dr. James Dobson Celebrates 40 Years in Broadcasting

James Dobson, one of the most respected and influential American evangelical leaders, is marking his 40th year in broadcasting, having reached hundreds of millions of people over the decades ministering to marriages and families, reports the Christian Post.

In 1977, Dobson opened a two-room office in Arcadia, California, leaving what he called a “plumb position” in academia as a professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California. He said when he embarked on this journey it was kind of scary.

Dobson told The Christian Post, “I loved what I was doing. But I saw the institution of the family starting to disintegrate.”

Within a few years, Focus on the Family had hundreds of employees, and Dobson’s programs were aired on hundreds of radio stations and by the time he left in 2009, he was reaching 220 million people a day in 150 countries.

Then, Dobson founded Family Talk, a nonprofit that produces his radio program, “Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk,” which has nearly 7 million likes on its Facebook page.

When he used his platform to address the sanctity of life and marriage, he got some pushback. Dobson said, “But I will never, ever apologize for defending the unborn child or defending marriage. That’s not politics … that’s not saying ‘vote for a Republican.’”

Forty years later, Dobson said, “Marriage is still the foundation for the entire culture, and … parents have one responsibility that stands above the rest, to get your children into the hands of Christ.”

Five Chinese Christians Sentenced to Three to Five Years in Prison

A court in Xinjiang, China convicted five Christians on April 18th for “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order”, sentencing them to three to five years in prison, after their October 2016 trial, reports Asia News.

All five pleaded not guilty and said they would appeal the verdict.

Spiritual Revival Comes to China Through House Churches

China is in the grip of ‘one of the world’s great spiritual revivals’, Pulitzer-prize winning author Ian Johnson is claiming, reports The Atlantic.

“The Chinese people are looking for new moral guideposts, some sort of moral compass to organize society, So they are turning to religion as a source of values to help reorganize society. The drivers of this ‘religious revolution’ are Christian house churches which are unregistered and disapproved of by the Chinese state.

“They’ve helped the number of Protestants soar from about one million when the communists took power to at least 60 million today.”

Church in New York and Christian Group Host Conference on Freedom from Pornography

Many churches are openly tackling issues of substance abuse and addiction, in terms of drugs and alcohol, but few are addressing pornography.

Church of the Messiah of Glen Falls, New York and the group Healing Spring Christian Ministries co-hosted the “Chains Be Broken Conference” last Saturday.

Jennifer Griswold-Kuhn, the wife of the pastor, said, “We need to change our church communities to be more vulnerable and authentic.”

President Trump Presents Ambitious Plan for Tax Reform

President Trump’s call yesterday for a dramatic overhaul of the tax code sets in motion his most ambitious legislative initiative to date, testing whether he can cut the deal of his life, reports the Washington Post.

He wants to replace the seven income tax brackets with three new ones, cut the corporate tax rate by more than 50 percent, abolish the alternative-minimum tax and estate tax, and create new incentives to simplify filing returns.

Ann Coulter Cancels Speech at University of California

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has canceled her speech planned for this week at the University of California’s Berkeley campus after a dispute with university officials, who feared violent protests, over whether a safe venue could be found, reports Reuters.

And that’s the World View in Five Minutes.